Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas - Maya Angelou [58]
“And through Harlem, we'll go a struttin'
We'll go a struttin' and there'll be nuttin'
Too good for you.”
She cannot resist his entreaty, his style and the drugs. She leaves with him.
Porgy returns and is told of Bess's journey, and against the pleas of his neighbors, calls for his goat, hitches the cart to the animal and sets out to travel to New York to find his Bess.
The naïve story is given dramatic pace by the birth of a longed-for child, a hurricane in which a member of the community is killed and a picnic where Sportin' Life tries to tempt the religious people away from their beliefs.
On Friday, breathless, excited and afraid, I arrived at dusk in Montreal.
I was met at the airport, and although it was too early for the cast to assemble, taken directly to the theater. Backstage, men shouted to one another in French and English and hustled around, pulling ropes and adjusting pieces of scenery. When I walked onto the empty set, all the shards of the last two days' tensions fell away. I was suddenly in the papier-mâché world of great love, passion and poignancy.
I was examining Porgy's cabin and the house where Robbins' widow, Serena, sings her mournful aria when the singers began to trickle into the back of the theater.
Ella Gerber saw me slouching upstage in the shadows.
“Oh, Maya, you've arrived!” She came forward. “Here's your script, your hotel and room number. A schedule for rehearsals. I suggest you watch this performance carefully and study your script tonight. You'll be rehearsing tomorrow.”
She said I had no dressing room because I would not be performing until we arrived in Italy, but she would tell the cast that I had arrived.
My fears that I had been forgotten turned out to be baseless. When Ella led me down the dressing room corridor, she called out, “Maya's here!”
Martha Flowers ran out into the hall. “La première danseuse, elle est ici!”
Lillian Hayman followed smiling, saying “Welcome.”
Barbara Ann Webb grinned, spread her arms and made “Hey, girl” sound like “Where have you been so long?” and “Why weren't you here sooner?”
The three women shared a cluttered dressing room and I sat amid the costumes and the disarray of make-up, watching them prepare for the show. Martha was as delicately made as a Stradivarius. Her complexion was the rich brown of polished mahogany and her hands fine and small. She had large bright eyes. Her lips, full and open, revealed even white teeth in the dark face. She called herself, and was called by her friends, “Miss Fine Thing.” Rightly.
If Martha was a violin, Lillian Hayman was a cello. She was a medium-brown woman of heavy curves and deep arches. Her dignified posture caused her to be regarded as stout rather than fat, and she moved lightly as if her weight might be only in the eye of the beholder. She had a handsome face softened by a ready warm smile. She was a dramatic soprano and the description was apt.
Barbara Ann Webb, a lyric soprano, was the innocent when I joined the company, and so she remained until I left. She was nearly as large as Lillian, but her curves were younger and more conventionally arranged. A Texan, she had an openness that reminded me of sunshine in movies by Technicolor. Her skin was a shade lighter than a ripe peach, and had she been white, she could have been a stand-in for Linda Darnell. Throughout ten countries and fifteen cities, those three women became and remained my closest friends.
That first night the chatter in the dressing room wound down and there was a knock at the door.
“Fifteen minutes.”
“O.K.,” Lillian shouted.
I had heard the announcement of “Half-hour” earlier, but none of the women responded. Now Martha turned away from the mirror and her eyes glazed, began to sing “Do re me fa sol la ti do.” I didn't know whether I was expected to say something, then Lillian also dropped her interest in our conversation and an unseeing look came into her eyes, she stretched her lips in